


Through the grime and the dirt

by Hashilavalamp



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Historical AU, Human AU, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, World War II
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-11
Updated: 2017-07-01
Packaged: 2018-11-12 23:33:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11172411
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hashilavalamp/pseuds/Hashilavalamp
Summary: A collection of RusGer works, some set in Human AUs and occasionally based on prompts.1.War time has lead Ivan astray: injured and separated from his troop he awakes in a German man's house. There is little he learns about his unlikely savior beyond his name - not even what drove his enemy to save his life. And Ivan simply can't wrap his mind around it, not even when the war only rages in his head and the dust begins to settle in Berlin. He has to find out what Ludwig saw in him back then.2.Through the whirlwind of the early 20th century, Ivan is swept away to Germany under the orders of the new Bolshevik government. Indulging in the occasional trip to the local bar to ease the dull workdays, he comes across a man named Ludwig. A friendship begins to form with uncertain ends.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Because there is never enough of this tiny ship I asked for some prompts and will publish all that those yield in this neat little collection~  
> So far the prompts I've worked on are Human AUs and historic, but there's probably also gonna be some modern and canonverse stuff!

The air feels heavy on his shoulders, undisturbed and stagnant despite the wafting scent of soup.

Ivan’s injuries sting from irritation and disinfectant beneath the gauze of bandages, but the growling of his empty stomach has been a cruel companion for far too long. It’s at its worst when the promise of food is near.   
The German in the room doesn’t seem to have registered the noise, Ivan notes dully. Ivan can see him in the kitchen from where he is seated in the dining room, at the head of the table like a guest of honor. What destroys the image is that he can also see the handgun resting on the counter, always in reach.   
But at least: if the German wanted him dead, he could have just left him lying in the field and the elements would have done the job for him. Or a zealot neighbor. He wouldn’t have even had to waste a bullet on him.

Ivan doesn’t actually understand _why_ he’s still alive, although he’s been thinking it over since the moment he awoke and wasn’t covered in ice from head to toe and there was no gun pointed at his face.   
He doesn’t see what this German man hopes to gain from it – and a gain he must see, somehow, because that’s how Germans are. Germans inside the Soviet Union are kulaks and Germans outside of it are Nazis, that’s pretty telling. Fyodor from the Volga had told Ivan so just a month ago with the muzzle of his rifle pressed to a dead man’s cheek.  
Ivan takes any information given to him with a few grains of salt but the explanation just aligned fairly well with the images of war imprinted in his mind.   
And well, ‘his’ German looks like the kind of man Ivan would see on ripped off propaganda posters. He’s tall and still rather broad. Blond hair combed sternly and secured with hair wax, his eyes a startling shade of blue. Handsome, sort of. Guy should be out there getting himself killed, but instead he stays in this house and cooks soup for a _Russkie_.

Funny how that happens.

Soup is served with some bread eventually, and Ivan falls upon it like a plague of locust. He doesn’t eat with much dignity, stray drops of soup soak into the fabric of the odd little tablecloth, but hunger is so much stronger than any force of social convention that could have held him tethered. The food doesn’t taste of much, but it’s the best thing he has ever tasted in his life.   
At the other end of the table, the German has taken his seat and eats slowly. His face is impassive but deathly pale, the shoulders hunched and movements painstakingly deliberate as though he were building a house of cards and not moving a spoon from a bowl to his lips.   
The gun sits innocently by his side, moved by a ghost’s hand.

And Ivan understands that the German is scared too.

“Thank you” Ivan says in Russian once he has finished and the hunger aches have dulled. He forces the muscles of his face to form a smile – not really charming from somebody like him but it’s the nicest expression he has to offer. Intimidation is all fun and games and Ivan would have had little inhibitions any other day, on any other day when a German didn’t save his worthless life. He’s got manners.

The German’s face drains of some last color and he says something curt that Ivan doesn’t understand but guesses its meaning is ‘You’re welcome’.  

Ivan should kill him, but he doesn’t.

.

.

.

The German is called Ludwig.

Ludwig told him so after putting away the dishes, his deep voice distorted by a wary underlying tremble.   
Ivan had introduced himself first, unprompted by words but compelled by a sudden pull in his chest when Ludwig had carefully dried a bowl with a cloth. Ludwig had blinked as if he didn’t know what to make of somebody randomly saying their name and emphatically pointing at themselves, and then his own name slipped over his lips as though a secret had been given away.

And now Ivan sits in an armchair, the injuries of his body coming well back to life now that his hunger has been staved off a little bit. Makes him worry that he will not have the power to stand up again later, the seat just a little too comfortable for comfort. Ivan hasn’t sat inside a proper home in a very long time and it’s nearly off-putting how nice and orderly everything in the room is in comparison to the outside world and the desolate scenes playing in Ivan’s head. The shelves are filled with books, everything is well and lovingly maintained and quite frankly in a much better state than Ivan’s Muscovite home has ever seen.

When Ludwig isn’t looking, Ivan grabs one of the framed pictures standing on a chest of drawers and looks at the captured moment feeling like a voyeur. It’s a photograph of Ludwig and another man wearing simple uniforms and smiles. Ludwig’s is more hesitant, embarrassed almost.   
The swastika can’t be hidden, even if Ludwig of the past tried to cover it up with his hand.

Ivan sneers instinctively; he hears floorboards creak under the weight of footsteps and yet he doesn’t put the picture aside. Ludwig’s expression darkens for just a second when he sees it, his posture rigid and defensive as though he had to justify himself in the light of this.   
Which is unnecessary, because war already taught Ivan a lot about Nazis.

With stiff fingers Ivan taps on the glass protecting the fragile memory printed to paper, wishing he knew more German words than military expressions and ‘potato’, but this ought to do the job of communicating his question just fine.

_Aren’t you supposed to be fighting?_

Ludwig remains cautious as though they were predators circling one another, but eventually he seems to understand what Ivan is trying to get at. With his mouth just a grim line in his face, he points at his knee and at a cane that Ivan hadn’t noticed before. He makes a noise of understanding and the tension simmers down to a low unpleasant hum once the frame is placed back in its place, a little stain right where Ivan had pressed down his finger.

Ivan stupidly stretches to break out of the haze but the wound in his side protests, skin presumably tearing open under layers of clothing and gauze. To his credit, Ludwig is right beside him instantly, brusquely pulling clothing to reveal the glaring white of the bandages.

Ivan gets a little light-headed from the pain searing in his flesh but wow, he’s receiving some good service here.

.

.

.

With clumsy sutures and new bandages, Ivan once again wonders why he’s still alive.

He’s not been very nice, he doesn’t think. And he’s a Russian and Ludwig has a gun and could just leave him to rot. That’s a lot more paths leading to death than to life Ivan thinks, but maybe God just gifted him with a ton of fucking luck instead of brains. If there is a God.

Ivan drifts in and out of consciousness, blinking against both blinding sunlight and darkness, hearing the sound of a key locking the door and gunshots fired in the distance as he buries himself in the blankets. When Ludwig wakes him properly and makes him eat and drink, Ivan once again blurts out a thanks that his younger prideful self would have resented horribly and that Ludwig takes with the same anxious quiet as the last one. The urge to intimidate him for fun grows stronger.    
Ludwig is a strange person, and Ivan curses the language barrier. Why couldn’t Germans just all speak Russian?

There are a few things that Ivan picks up in his bed rest but it’s not fun to have to observe and put the pieces together instead of having the luxury to ask.

.

.

.

Things need to go very quickly very fast.

Ivan’s wounds are still far from healing when Ludwig already stands downstairs with a heavy suitcase and an emptier looking living room. His hair isn’t combed, his clothes thrown on with much less care than, well, on the other few days that Ivan has seen him. Even Germans have off days. There’s noise outside, the usual static of artillery but also a sea of voices reeling with panic and the desperate desire to move.

Somehow Ivan knows that his army friends are on the town’s doorstep.

Ludwig confirms it as he opens his suitcase again to stuff another small piece of décor into it – he knows he’s not going to find his house standing once this is over. He knows this is the end of the rope. “Evacuation” Ludwig says, and the word is similar enough to Russian that Ivan understands. But then, he also understands on a more instinctual level.

It’s really sad in a strange way.   
Ivan has marched through cities before and watched calmly as flames engulfed everything that had once been loved and inhabited by people he’d helped kill, but still a sense of sorrow swirls in his chest. There’s so many traces of life in this house, how many generations had lived here already? Ludwig looks empty and miserable, and Ivan’s heart bleeds just a little bit.

Maybe he cares just in this one case.

There’s a strange precarious feeling that fills the air between them, not the same distrustful tension that had accompanied their interactions so far. Ivan isn’t sure how to describe it, but it makes him think of the time Irina had hugged him last and her hand had lingered on his arm as she’d drawn back. That touch had been louder than the plea in her eyes, the plea for him not to go because he’d get himself killed and it doesn’t matter if he does it for Stalin or the fatherland or communism or for some vain idea of heroism.

Perhaps, if such an absolute farewell were translated into a feeling, this would be it.

And now, he hasn’t known Ludwig for nearly as long as he has known his dear sister, but there is some fondness on his part. Saying goodbye isn’t fun, and Ludwig is saying goodbye to his whole life.

“Auf Wiedersehen” Ludwig says, leaning on his walking cane and his eyes for once not averted.

.

.

.

Two years later Ivan is still alive through sheer force of fool’s luck.

He lives in Berlin now, stuck together with two other people in a small apartment and writing letters to his dear sisters back at home. Coming back has been proving much more difficult than staying for him and he’s not sure how long it’s going to take him, but isn’t it nice to know he’s not dead?

“Make yourself useful!” one of his roommates calls from the next room and Ivan curses under his breath because startled as he is he dropped his pen.   
Gilbert is a pest sometimes, and mostly because Ivan knows the man is fluent in Russian and simply refuses to speak it in Ivan’s presence. _If you’re gonna stay here you better learn the language_ he’d said, and that was the last Russian he’d spoke to Ivan, and well of course it makes sense but it’s still unnecessarily stressful. They have bigger things to worry about than language proficiency. Like keeping their residence. And getting food.

Gilbert’s pretty good at the latter, so Ivan doesn’t push his luck when it comes to annoying him.   
(He also suspects Gilbert hides a gun from them and the wounds are all a little too fresh for there to be no hatred between them.)

Dutiful but grumbling Ivan drags himself to the room over where Gilbert is just putting on a jacket himself, looking as harried as he ever did. Ivan’s never seen him in a state of resting somehow. Even in his sleep he kicks and turns.   
Ivan doesn’t bother asking where he’s going, he’s not going to get an answer that makes sense, so he asks what Gilbert considers useful.

In response, Gilbert shoves a paper at him and Ivan nearly sighs, maternal in the way Irina always sighed when he did something that would only end in hurt. This is the fifth time that Gilbert’s done this, without the effort yielding any results.   
Must be troublesome to have a younger brother and to not know whether he is still alive or not and whether he’s out there trying to find you or decaying somewhere in the east. Gilbert doesn’t talk much about his baby brother, but his regularly exercise in futility says enough about his love when he heads out to attach a piece of paper inquiring about a Ludwig Beilschmidt to an overflowing board of grievance.

Gilbert is going somewhere else in the cold light of morning though, so the task falls to Ivan.

.

.

.

The only times of day that Ivan leaves the house willingly and with some level of comfort is in the early hours of the day or past nightfall. He likes the way the light, glowing and waning alike, paints colors and shadows with the rubble and debris of the once mighty city – and there’s a smaller risk of hostile Germans finding him and of meeting old friends again. Just a precaution really, since some old Soviet comrades still prowl about like wild dogs in Berlin’s streets.   
Things didn’t go smoothly the last time they clashed and things might have gone really downhill, and Ivan is very tired of that.

Few people cross his path, and ever fewer people lounge about at the board. A frantic looking woman bends closer to it, brushing over the paper moving in the morning breeze and her suffering exposed by the early sun, but beside her nobody is really quite there yet and shadows of people lean pressed against the remaining house walls.   
Just looking, just contemplating, just seeing whether it will be worth it.

Ivan takes a moment to study the weary faces if only to match them up to any that he may remember from service days. The coast is clear, today.   
Ivan breaks off from the walls, drawing some attention to himself but his own attention directing itself at movement in his periphery. He slowly turns on the spot, winching at the strain put on his never quite recovered side.

A young man strolls down one of the broader streets, seeming small in his battered suit and carried by uncertainty as if each step were a struggle against himself. As if he didn’t wish to be here but is pulled in anyway because the unknown is so devastating that humanity has created gods upon gods to fill it, and all this man has to do is search for a name on a board. It’s gonna hurt, Ivan thinks. And then blinks.

Maybe the shadows are playing tricks on him this time but.

Well no, that’s not happening.

He knows this face.

It’s funny because the memory is so blurred by now. It was only a few days two years ago and Ivan had spent most of that time trying not to fall victim to the injuries in his flesh, and yet the face is familiar in a way that defies what Ivan considers logic. It tugs at his mind, the image of that man in East Prussia with his suit case at the edge of his life and the hardened eyes and the soft goodbye.

Ivan does the only thing that makes sense. His smile is crooked as he turns the paper over in his rough hands and holds it up. With heavily accented German he asks, recognition dawning on the man’s face.

“Hey Ludwig, is this you?”

.

.

.

The days of uneasy peace between three enemies are over because spring comes early this year. Prussia is forever dead and gone through the mere stroke of a pen and yet Gilbert glows with a sort of energy that Ivan has never witnessed from him before. The photograph of the brothers stands on the rickety little bedside table in Gilbert’s room, and a pen ensured no swastika can separate them from humanity anymore.  
Gilbert sings like a choir.

Ivan feels a certain sense of smugness at the fact that technically, he had helped this outcome along. He had brought some semblance of happiness into this now much too small little apartment. _Four is a crowd_ Francois mutters unhappily in the mornings - Francois doesn’t really want to be here anyway but life has its ways of getting you stuck, so Gilbert slaps him on the shoulder and tells him to fuck off if it’s so bad. Francois sticks around.

So does Ivan because he never really minded crowded spaces the way other people seem to. Poor a substitute as it is, there is something strangely comforting about the lack of personal space in that it reminds him of his early childhood days. The constant buzz of voices means that he is never truly alone and it doesn’t matter then if he is wanted or not.

The only thing that taints the experience a little is when he hears Ludwig’s voice.

Ludwig doesn’t talk to him or Francois, he just moves between the few rooms like a ghost and tries to repair the cracks in the walls when the others are gone. When they are in the same room somehow, it’s that circling again. As though Ludwig still had his hand on his gun in his fear, and Ivan’s injuries bled beneath the bandages.   
The only way for Ivan to hear Ludwig’s voice is through the thin walls, late at night when the brothers speak in hushed tones. Too fast and too colloquial for Ivan to understand beyond a few words here and there, and he wonders if Ludwig ever mentioned where the stain on the glass of the picture frame came from before Gilbert had wiped it away.

.

.

.

Ivan sometimes dreams of Ludwig’s hands, when the pain in his side washes over him like a fever tide at night. Like a pull at long-gone stitches, pull until fingers gleam ruby red. The memory feels like a dream itself but it’s hard to forget that you owe your life to somebody else.

.

.

.

It continues to nag him like a rash.

It makes things feel just a little off every time he speaks to Gilbert, like moving all furniture a single inch from its original place and you will not be able to say what is wrong because it simply is. A little off, a little off-kilter, a little awful. Even though it’s not a lie and even though Ivan wouldn’t have cared normally even if it were one.

Thank God Gilbert doesn’t talk to him too much. Ivan likes where he lives now, sort of, his German is still pretty shoddy but the rotting apartment feels a bit like belonging among people that nobody needs.

He likes the path leading to it too. There’s a large gate in the house façade, small holes like eyes where once glass panes had been. It leads into a small dark hall, the ground beneath his feet tiled and the walls mostly intact bricks haphazardly painted in different colors like a big nonsensical mosaic, curving towards the ceiling. To the left a little staircase opens even though the highest floor of the building has long caved in and nobody has the time or resources to fix it yet, but straight ahead there is another wooden gate. It’s never locked because even though behind it lies what would once have been a secluded little court, there’s just not enough buildings around anymore to close it off that well.   
He just needs to cross the court from there to get to the front door of his place of residence. One flight of stairs up and one frail door to the right. It’s almost like a little ritual for Ivan even though he could certainly find a quicker way through the empty lots.

He turns the key as he always does and the hall engulfs him in a blanket of darkness.

He’s not alone tonight.

.

.

.

Ludwig breathes heavily, that’s easy enough to hear and he looks like the people from the board of grievances with the way he presses himself against the brick wall and clenches his fists by his sides and shuts his eyes against the world.

It’s a moment of fragility that no man should ever be seen in and Ivan is not a gentle man. He’s not right for this. Maybe he ought to leave and come back again later when whatever mood has gripped Ludwig has subsided and things go back to avoidance, and yet: Ivan stays. Moving and making Ludwig remember he’s there feels almost unfairer than being there.

Ludwig’s breath come out in little stutters in the black hiding most of his shame, and Ivan waits leaned against the wall like a retired tool, waits until the stertorous sound mellows out into the normal kind.   
Ludwig and he haven’t spent this much time together occupying the same space since 1945 and maybe this is an opportunity.

“Are you okay?” Ivan asks eventually, and Ludwig head snaps up and he looks at him like he did back then. Pale and impassive and terrified by Ivan’s presence, and just somehow managing to look intimidating himself.   
“I’m fine” Ludwig lies bluntly, the taste of ash in his mouth judging from the way he grimaces.

Ludwig quickly turns and his steps echo out in the empty hall, trapped in the limbo surrounding them, this place that is neither here nor there in terms of territory. Outside lies Berlin and inside lies Gilbert, and here it’s just them and the dying rats. The hand on the handle of the unlocked gate leading to the court, Ivan realizes that this is an opportunity.

“Why didn’t you let me die?”

.

.

.

They sit on the cold and cracked tiles against the bricks because Ludwig’s knee causes trouble again and so does Ivan’s side.   
Ludwig doesn’t speak for a long while after that as though he needed to collect all spirit left in his shell of a body and Ivan just takes the time to light a cigarette and smoke away the tremble in his hands as his patience runs thin as a creek in a drought.  Ludwig reprimands Gilbert for smoking inside. This Ludwig doesn’t reprimand him the same way.

“Ask something different” Ludwig demands when Ivan has pressed the butt of the cigarette against ceramic.

Irritation burns in Ivan’s fingertips but he is kind and indulges Ludwig. At least this time he can ask questions this time, can listen to answers.   
“Why the uniform?” He used the wrong article, Ludwig points out. Fucking articles.

“Our father was a veteran, in the war before. We wanted to be like that” Ludwig explains tersely, skirting around formulations after aborted attempts, simplifying speech where he can. “I got injured and went home and studied and worked.”

“For whom?”

Ludwig answers with the name of a company, but that wasn’t what Ivan asked at all. Ludwig wants to misunderstand, Ivan thinks bitterly, he wants to misunderstand or Ivan’s German is worse than he thought it is. “Why did you work?” he ventures mercilessly, in any case.   
“Because I think I like being alive, and I like work” Ludwig replies straight this time, his eyes tracing patterns on the wall in the meager light streaming through the holes in the gate.

“Shouldn’t Germans die for Hitler? Why live?” Ivan says and wonders if he’s gonna break something more than grammar tonight. “Did you see a photo of Hitler in our living room?” Ludwig counters tonelessly and Ivan tries to think, tries to recall the room from the arm chair where he’d sat and waited for his comrades to fall upon the town so he could sneak back into their lines. Tries to remember it from before Ludwig had given his farewell.   
Eyes from photographs had bored down on Ivan, judgmental in trying to determine his worth by the weight of his genes and the properties of his blood, but there was a suspicious absence of mustaches in most of them. No Hitler to haunt this house.

“You were a bad Nazi.”

Ludwig winches and an ugly sound comes out of his throat, a suffocated laugh. The air is stagnant, nicotine laced and heavy. “I was.”

“The worst. You didn’t let me die” Ivan says again, joking but serious because he needs to know, needs answers to the questions he’s asked himself back then. Why is he still alive, why would anyone do that for an enemy, why would Ludwig have kept him alive, what had he gained from it—

Ludwig licks his lips, vacant in eyes and expression. “I tried to be a good Nazi once but… I wasn’t and I wouldn’t be. I thought I could let you die there in the field. But I couldn’t. That’s not the person I wanted to be anymore, and I needed to end it. Russia took my home, but you were some man dying in my backyard like a dog.”

And for the first time in two years, Ludwig looks him in the eye, years younger and anxious underneath the rough features. “I’m sorry if that’s not. Enough. Not what you were searching for.”

Ivan thinks back on the soup and the bread in his stomach, the stitches in his side, the photo. The hours spent in an empty house of a life that was gone forever, looking at the shambles Ludwig left behind.  
Ludwig had been a man broken into little pieces, but somehow he’s a complete human being now anyway.

“Thank you.”

Ludwig smiles hesitantly as though he didn’t know what else to do, almost embarrassed.

.

.

.

They celebrate Ludwig’s 30th birthday as the world beyond them crystallizes into another conflict, but that’s not really important because even if they’re in the eastern part of Berlin they’re hanging in there pretty well.   
They’ve found work by now, and Francois hasn’t left yet even though they still live in that tiny apartment on the edge of the district. I’m leaving once I have saved enough money Francois says, his once short blond hair slowly growing past his chin. Maybe just for the west at first if it gets unbearable. Everyone looks at Ivan when such comments are made because then he’s suddenly a Russkie again, but he just shrugs. He’s not thinking of killing anyone anymore, he’s thinking of ways to bring Irina and Natalia here. They’re married by now and have told him no. But he can try anyway.

Ludwig asks if he wants beer and Ivan gladly accepts the offer. He misses his vodka but this is a beer or wine household when they do get their hands on alcohol, because nobody has good taste here. Ludwig sees the curling of his lips, or just knows what’s going through his head, because he gives him a stern deadpan look and inclines his head just a little bit.

The way Ludwig can read him now is almost gross. They never should have started talking, never should have sat together in the hall. 1945 should have remained a festering memory to succumb to one day in a nostalgic fit, and then box it up and push it under the bed for a few decades more, collecting dust until you could pretend it was gone.   
But it didn’t.   
And Ivan is glad for it in a strange way.

Ludwig is a fond memory, despite circumstance. And a not terrible companion when he isn’t being strict and neurotic and makes everyone clean the apartment in a joint effort – bad Nazi or not, he certainly was a man of the military once. It leaves in Ivan the desire to revolt and intimidate, but at the end of the day Ivan huffs and sneezes from cleaning the dusty cupboard like the rest. Gilbert laughs and pats Ludwig on the shoulder. You’re a good influence on him, he says.

Things are just strange and different, and it’s better because nobody knows.   
It’s something that connects only them in the faraway lands of a dead nation, the stitches in Ivan’s side then and the empty space between them on the threshold.

Ludwig laughs quietly at some remark from his brother, and Ivan likes to think. He likes to think that there is a place where he fits into somebody else’s life. It’s not neatly, it’s an open wound with ragged edges, but they are intertwined in each other’s fates like tangled threads.

Because Ludwig had looked at his life and thought it was something worth saving despite the red to his name. Ivan likes to think he would return the favor one day, all pride aside.

.

.

.

There’s a word for it.

Ivan doesn’t want to think nor speak it, because these things didn’t exist in Russia. He’s only seen it in camps, remaining caged where others were allowed to think they were free now.

But there is a word that gives sense to the hands in his dreams and the fluttering in his chest.

He thinks it, and it doesn’t sting as much as it looms over him.

He wants to occupy his lips with something else so he will never have to speak it.

.

.

.

Ludwig didn’t know what he was saving. He didn’t have anything that could have clued him in on what kind of person was bleeding there and pathetically begging for his helpbeyond the uniform, so it had been a huge stupid gamble. Ivan could have been any more devoted soldier, any more devoted criminal, could have been pulling a trick on him that ended with a bullet between Ludwig eyes, and it was mere luck that Ivan didn’t know anything and didn’t want anything except maybe a good soup.

Ludwig didn’t know what would become of the man when he’d left him in that house. How could he have known the man would thrive and spread like weeds all the way to Germany’s heart and into Gilbert’s apartment because nothing else seemed to make sense. What do you do with a gifted life? Ivan hadn’t known.    
And to be fair, he still doesn’t know. He’s wasting away a little, walking the line of a reject among his Soviet friends and a monster for the Germans, but Ludwig hasn’t demanded anything back yet so he continues for as long as he’s permitted to. Taking advantage of kindness is a skill.

It still leaves a residue of greasy disgust towards himself when he walks through the streets at night with Ludwig just in reach and talking about what he has planned. He wants to work, wants to be a politician maybe, he doesn’t know whether it will be possible because everything seems terrible, and maybe he’ll have to move westwards, and maybe he’ll just stay the scientist he’s been studying to be. Poor man doesn’t seem to know that he rambles when he is agitated, so Ivan puts a hand on his shoulder in silent sympathy. Ludwig glares, but his shoulder doesn’t go stiff under the touch.

“What are you going to do?” Ludwig asks. “Ask me another question” Ivan answers with artificial guilelessness.

They round the corner and Ludwig fiddles with the key for the lock, frustration coloring his expression until the gate swings open for them.

This short passage still feels like limbo to Ivan.

Their steps echo together, their beings suspended somewhere between two different worlds in the void where there they have only one another.

Limbo.

Only limbo.

His heart thrums just beneath his skin, fluttering like the bird on Gilbert’s window sill in the mornings.  
His skin burns even though fall approaches.

This is just limbo and nothing matters.

Ivan kisses Ludwig against the brick wall in a rush of stupid impulsiveness and adoring admiration. 

His last kiss was a year ago in an ill-fated affair with a woman everyone had warned him about, and it hadn’t tasted the way he had wanted it to. Her touch had been something he had loved years ago but it was off, just a little off.   
Ivan savors the taste now because he has thrown his gift away just like that, because it’s been a while and because Ludwig has a care for the world that Ivan hadn’t known before. Because he can think of nothing else that he could do with it, with a life owed to kindness and humanity, than to want to repay it in kind. Precious was a word Ivan read in books, precious were Ivan’s sisters safe back at home, but Ivan’s life wasn’t precious until it had been dragged away from the flames of hell and he had for the first time in his life felt free. 

He wants to take his freedom and the kindness and return it, in the vague hopes that Ludwig might feel the way. Ludwig should feel precious too, precious not just to family but to a man that could have been his enemy, but wasn’t because Ludwig had been human and not a Nazi. There was nothing to his name once, but now Ivan has grown, he has love and some other questionably good things that he can give.  
He’s not a bad kisser. One complaint less for Ludwig.

Empty space expands between them when Ivan pulls back, rubbing the back of his hand over his lips as though it would erase anything and he wonders if his eyes are pleading. God he fucking hopes they don’t. He has some pride left, some smudge, burried--

Pride means nothing anymore when Ludwig kisses him too.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This prompt came from another anon, it's a human AU set in the 1920s! I went with the year 1926 specifically <3   
> Hope you enjoy!

One of the earliest things Ivan ever learned in life was that he was helpless in the face of his fate and that life’s paths were not his own to choose but for circumstance to push and pull along, and sometimes he’d end up on bad ones and sometimes on good ones.

He had been born in a village in the middle of what had felt like nowhere, watched and punished by his grandmother and he hadn’t known his mother’s face until she came by to bring his younger sister to their house. He’d thought one day he’d work the fields for some family and be called Vanka and maybe learn how to play a simple instrument to keep himself entertained through the long nights.

And then his father had taken him home. Ivan had known his father’s name only by way of his patronymic but he wasn’t a boy who questioned what grandmother told him, and if she told him the sky was red and this man was his father.   
So three children followed the stranger to St Petersburg in the middle of the night, and Ivan learned that his mother was dead then but that wasn’t very important because everyone told him what a bright child he was. And so the vision of his future had fractured and the shards were put together to form a different kind of life for himself: maybe in a suit, not new but enough to clothe his body for a small administrative job for some factory owner. Or maybe in work clothes, choking on smoke and flees. Would all depend on how well he’d do.

But you know, revolutions happen and civil wars heave up like an ancient dark beast only to be slain like dogs. A little while later Ivan had found himself in Moscow and a suit, his head feeling only half as bright and knowing more tongues than anyone trusted him to. Languages came easily to him; not all fluently of course. Ukrainian and German he could do.

And then Ivan was in Berlin.

Made sense because Berlin was the heart of Germany, their fickle friend that flirted with west and east alike, trapped in the constraints of capitalism. Nobody exists in vacuums, and Mother Russia needs money and Germany needs natural resources, and trade is really very important now, so please go Ivan, go help that along and do your part in the system you’re in. So he’d went.

And now he was there equipped with a new surname and worked and he wasn’t going to question any of it.   
That evening he let his feet carry him to a local bar on a pure whim. The noises and smells that greeted him whenever he passed the street lured him with promises of a world he wasn’t quite made for, not in Petrograd nor Berlin, and yet he found little use in denying himself all earthly pleasures just because this was a country with no morals.  
The bar was predictably loud and bursting with the patrons’ emotions and song and dance, and Ivan ordered himself a couple of drinks and nearly came in late for work the following day nursing an ache that ran deeper than the pounding of his skull.  He contemplated penning a letter to Irina and ask her to send him things to ease the pain because maybe he missed home.

He returned to the bar every week until the people knew his name even though he didn’t remember ever telling them and he humored them with stoic expressions and refusals to join the dancing, enduring the call of comrade that came so mocking from some mouths here.   
Eventually though he found a companion in his corner, a man whose name was Ludwig Beilschmidt and he was a harried policeman who’d chased his brother and friend all the way through the city and had then resigned himself to a drink.

Heavy as lead with exhaustion Ludwig pointed at two men further away, people flocking to their broad grins and outrageous stories. “They’d said they’d help me with some paperwork today” Ludwig explained, his drink of choice already at his lips. “Awful people they are.”

“They are just enjoying themselves” Ivan pointed out blithely, allowing a tiny expression of amusement. Somehow the German’s grim expression awoke the need in Ivan to counteract it to restore a balance.   
“You defend them?” Ludwig said drily. “I’m saying there is nothing you can do about that now, so all that remains for you to do is enjoy yourself a little as well if they already brought you here.” Ivan lifted his glass. _“Prost.”_

For a moment Ludwig simply watched him with unconcealed scrutiny as though he were on the hunt for a criminal; he was probably quite good at his job with a look as piercing and unrelenting as that even in the rather dingy lighting. “Prost.”

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.

.

Ludwig was a rather quiet fellow which Ivan both relished in and resented.

They usually found themselves with their drinks in the same bar around the same time, rarely missing one another and not quite feeling the hole but still giving each other looks next time for abandoning them. It didn’t take a genius to figure that Ludwig wasn’t a man you’d usually find in such an establishment if it weren’t for the drinks and the music and the fact that his older brother bullied him into it. No surprise that he would be one of the few to appreciate that Ivan himself didn’t like talking half as much as he had, once.

But Ludwig made Ivan want to talk to fill the silence and sate the curiosity burning in his belly, how dare he.

The weight was always on Ivan to say the first word, an off-handed remark that mattered nothing about work or Ivan’s awful neighbor who pulled a different girl from the streets every night and reminded Ivan that he was 34 and unmarried – he should go back home and find some girl to marry and waste away in his apartment and work. He didn’t tell Ludwig that part though, too personal yet for bar conversations that were not drunk enough.    
Sometimes Ludwig reacted with a complaint of his own – traffic, losing his hat in yesterday’s bad weather, and his boss that he hates because his boss is incompetent but Ludwig can never help but keep his tongue. God, what a Prussian, Ivan would say and coax indignation and huffs of embarrassment from his acquaintance for it. The frustration seemed to matter less then.

A pleasant quiet lull in their pocket in the back in the corner with their drinks and a good view on the other people.

One day Ivan would crack Ludwig like an egg and then all his secrets and unspoken words would spill out.

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.

They started leaving together at times, sometimes because the hour called for it and on the rare occasion that a conversation had transpired between them that warranted for the night to be a little longer for them. With books Ivan had struck a nerve once and Ludwig had suddenly turned into a little waterfall, pulling a book out of his pocket one evening and giving Ivan Kafka to read and whatever German poet Ivan could ask for as if Ludwig housed a library of them in his heart.  The book itself lied unread on Ivan’s desk, but hearing somebody speak about something so dry with such passion was a good enough experience, better than any read could be.

Ivan in turn told Ludwig about Russian authors, some he hadn’t even read, and well the government said it wasn’t all that special and Ivan had no right to swell with such misplaced pride when Ludwig asked questions about Russia, but he did because korenizacija meant so little to him when he’d never had roots but the country that had given birth to him.

Ludwig hadn’t known they called St Petersburg Leningrad now.

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.

.

Ivan frowned.

“Well she’s pretty isn’t she? Go talk to her” he said and held his glass a little tighter as Ludwig fidgeted with an uncommon nervousness. “No thank you” he stated, his voice a little less sure tonight as he glanced from the lady in question to Ivan, his brow furrowed. Ivan grabbed him by the shoulder and pushed, a little rougher than he wanted and passing it off as a joke the very next second when a spark of ire lighted in Ludwig’s eyes.

“I’m being supportive.”

“I don’t want to talk to her.”

“Go do it anyway, I never see you talk with women. I think you will burst from all the blood in your face.”

Ludwig grimaced and fidgeted, scratching with fingernails at wood without a care for splinters and something about him looked so far from normal and much closer to dissolving in some poison he’d cooked up in his own head. There were sleepless nights dug into his pale skin under his eyes and around his nail beds.

“I will never talk to a woman like that” he murmurs, and Ivan laughs full and loud and heads turn in confusion and alert. But he knew that Ludwig was being serious somehow, although he couldn’t fathom why, couldn’t understand why Ludwig lowered his gaze when a nice girl sought his eye.

A tremble hung in the air as Ludwig dug his fingernails into his own flesh.

“I’m not native to Berlin, I’m from the countryside. There are certain things that are alright here but nowhere else” Ludwig begun with uncertainty that Ivan didn’t know from him. Maybe the shell had its first crack, but somehow it wasn’t as pretty as he’d thought it would be and he wondered what would ooze from the wound and how ugly it would be. His mind still rang with laughter because maybe it was prudishness and Ludwig could not get himself to say the word without fear of ridicule.

“Well tell me what that is. I’ve slept with women in cities and countryside, there isn’t much difference” Ivan said in a poor attempt at comfort and Ludwig looked sick to his stomach and he drowned his answer in alcohol.

He had trouble walking by the time they’d struggled outside, sticking to the alleys that were kinder to men with reputations to lose. A bit like insects hiding from the light, but Ludwig wasn’t an insect. Just acted like he was one, trying to scurry and stumbling and Ivan felt sick too now, but because this wasn’t how Ludwig was meant to be. This was the wrong kind of vulnerable, the wrong kind of open.

“I can tell you what it is.”

Oh fuck no.

Ivan was half-way into saying he didn’t care, however Ludwig was already leaning against the wall and puking. His body strained with the effort of holding itself together like a fragile little something that would break just as easily as china.

“I’m—“

And Ivan thought of the wife he didn’t have and the children he hadn’t made, and the fact that he was 34 and had none of these things. Ludwig didn’t have them either.

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.

.

They continued to meet in that bar, in that corner, at that time.

Ludwig looked pale as death though and he drank more than he used to and in the back of his mind Ivan wondered if that was taking its toll in places where he didn’t see Ludwig. He’d never seen him in an uniform for example. Or at home, without a suit. How did that world look like now? Was it changed too?

Ivan didn’t know why there was a change at all. Liking men wasn’t illegal where he lived – he didn’t think it was. It was a peculiar affliction that befell certain men for reasons nobody quite understood but had a whole lot of explanations for, and Ivan hadn’t given them much mind. He wasn’t one of them and he knew none so what did it matter – and he knew one now, and Ludwig suffered like a dog, and it would have been kinder if Ludwig could have lived his life without such a phase. Ivan pitied him, but things didn’t need to be different now.

And yet Ludwig made them, selfish bastard.

Couldn’t he just drink his beer and be miserable about something else?

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.

Ivan made them different too he realized one day when Ludwig accidentally leaned against him and he drew away as though it were grandmother’s burning stove that left marks on his arms.   
And they hadn’t actually touched since then, which was weird because that hadn’t been an issue before.

Ivan thought about it and it made sense. Ludwig was suffering and giving him misleading hopes with proximity was surely considered torture in the oh so civilized west, because Ivan couldn’t be that kind of man too. He was a little late but he’d marry one day and father a whole bunch of children that wouldn’t live with their grandmother and would know him by his face maybe and not just their patronymics. That was the path life had put him on and that path he’d walk until he died or the wind carried him somewhere else again to unfamiliar shores. Maybe to Ukraine though.

Poor Ludwig had to go and make his own path.

And he did, and stopped showing up at the bar.

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Ludwig had given Ivan his address once because well, that’s just a thing you did and it was good to know in case one of them was too drunk or something along those lines. It had been an unspoken rule though that this was something for emergency purposes only and not something for day time visits when they were strangers out in the sunlight.   
Ivan skipped work and followed the directions passersby gave him when he asked for the street. And he got confused twice because the numbers of the houses on one side of the road go up and on the other side they go down, which made it hard to find the correct number in there.

Ludwig’s brother, seen only on that first evening, sat at the entrance with a cigarette in his hand and Ivan thought about leaving. He didn’t though, out of a strange sense of spite and anger at how Ludwig was moving away from him in a way they hadn’t agreed upon.

“I’m Ivan. Your brother owes me money” Ivan said to the man crouching at the entrance, strange red eyes fixing him from behind framed glasses and giving one last impulse for flight to Ivan’s legs. “You’re Ivan and you’ve been mooching off my brother you mean. I know who you are. Ludwig’s upstairs” the brother said with clenched teeth and narrowed devil eyes, tapping his foot and the same marks of unforgiving on his arms that decorated Ivan’s own.

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.

 The Beilschmidt family had a pretty nice apartment, if small. Or maybe that was because there was furniture crowding in every room and competing for room, from a heavy wardrobe and a trunk over a sofa and carpet and bureaus with neatly placed decorations on them. It had the sense of warmth that Ivan had been told homes have but an uncanny neatness to it that snuck in as a cold shiver down Ivan’s back.

He’d half-expected Ludwig to lie down in bed sick, propped up and on display like some kind of Lenin, but he bent over papers on his desk in front of an open window, muttering to himself. Ivan wasn’t sure what to make of it, feeling like a dirty spot on a white wall in this environment and boiling with a rage he didn’t understand. Ludwig wasn’t ill but he wasn’t coming.

“Why didn’t you show up?” Ivan asked instead of greeting and asking how it’s been, Ludwig flinching at the sudden sound of a voice behind him. When he turned he looked awful but pretty put-together. Shaved, hair combed neatly, his clothes impeccable and his face just blank and grim. “The alcohol isn’t good for my work performance, they made me call in sick today.” And Ludwig clicked his tongue as though it were an insult that he had been made to rest. “At least this way I can catch up on some work that was neglected.”

Papers are shuffled and pushed from one side of the desk to the other, a pen furiously scribbling away in Ludwig’s fever, and Ivan was so damn angry.

“Tell me next time” he demanded, and it seemed more petulant than he felt. “I waited.”

“You don’t need me to get drunk” Ludwig deflected it easily, not even looking up, not stopping to write as though Ivan wasn’t there. “And we don’t owe each other anything at all. Please excuse me, I need to have this done by tomorrow.”

And Ivan nearly screamed in frustration at something he didn’t understand, kicking and screaming and tearing at a fate he found himself not liking. Like somewhere the path had diverged and he had accidentally set food on the wrong road leading to the wrong ends, and now fate didn’t make sense. Like Kafka. Kafka made no fucking sense. Ivan had tried to read the book last night but he didn’t care about Josef K. and trials that transcended the human mind.  

Of course Ludwig would like Kafka.

Ivan struggles to put the words together in his mind because German suddenly slips from his control. Dumb language. He wished he’d never learned it.

It was his head then that cracked, a shell hit against the edge of a bowl, the shards digging inside under the pressure. He wasn’t sure what would spill from his mind either, how ugly it would, what swam in his own head.    
“Look at me.”

And Ludwig obliged exasperated, dealing with an infant he hadn’t asked to care for.

“You have this apartment, and you have work you care about, you have a brother who obviously loves you more than the world and you have photographs and all these things, all these things that you put effort into, but you don’t care enough to go for a drink with me. Just a goddamn drink. It doesn’t even cost you much, capitalist pig.”

The chair legs scraped loudly against the floor when Ludwig stood with squared shoulders and the inquisitive glare, just a few centimeters shorter than Ivan when he made himself look tall like this. “What the hell.”

“Good Christians don’t talk like that.”

“Good—Ivan shut up. Shut up.”

Ivan wanted to rant more and say horrible things that would leave both of them bleeding but he felt so choked up that nothing would really come out, just stupid comments that were just making him look unintelligent and like- like some _woman scorned_ , really. And he wasn’t, he was just a man that didn’t like—this.

Ludwig looked ready to puke again on that note, and so close.

Ludwig’s hands felt rough against the skin of Ivan’s face as he was pulled forward just a little, just enough for a kiss that was gentler than Ivan thought men would kiss. Just a butterfly touch of lips against each other as though Ludwig himself was regretting the action before it was carried out, barely enough to register for what it was.

“There you go. I’m not going back to the bar” Ludwig said matter-of-factly when he stepped back, his cheeks a blotchy red against the white of his fear and Ivan licked his lips and blinked rapidly in an attempt to process the events in some progression that was coherent because his thoughts weren’t and this wasn’t. This was Kafka, where things happen because they are a metaphor for something that Ivan didn’t get, some gray world in which protagonists meet and find that they obstruct each other with their own figurative places. Locking each other out of heavens and hells as insects and lawyers.

Ivan wondered what he had been locked out from just now.

But he steps forward in a hurry, because for some reason there wasn’t the feeling of loss as he had expected himself to feel, there was something unfurling deep inside that burned alongside the anger rattling his heart.   
Ludwig hissed through his teeth when Ivan grabbed him and pulled, pulled him in this time and it was meant to be any bit as harsh as it was and Ivan’s tongue caught on the imperfection of his teeth as he clenched his jaw and seethed.

“What is wrong with you?” he yelled, “what gives you the right to just leave? Like that?”

Ludwig’s disgustingly passive expression twisted, twisted with wrath of his own even though he didn’t have a right to it, not with how he acted. Not with—this. “It’s better. I saw you flinch away when I touched you. So I kissed you so you can leave now.”

“I’m not—“  
“You are. Just go.”

Ivan leaned in, driven by destiny’s strings coiling around his heart and intestines at a crossroad that shouldn’t be there and kissed Ludwig back, desperate to prove that he wasn’t that kind of man. And Ludwig owed him a drink. Ivan had to kiss him for that to show his devotion.   
Ludwig’s hands gripped on to the fabric of his shirt and kissed him back though, and at that point Ivan should have told him that this was enough and that the bar was waiting for them, but there was a funny taste that clung to Ludwig’s lips that Ivan wanted to keep on tasting just to put a name to it. Ludwig’s frame felt strange and awkward against his own.  
Warm though.

Warmth that his own body mirrored by the time Ludwig was against the wall. It was easier this way, no swaying or missteps when they could just be stationary together and Ivan could pretend this was something he knew. He wasn’t married and now it felt like he never would be, his fingers reaching for a body that he hadn’t been told to desire but lit a fire under his skin all the same.  This wasn’t proving anything anymore, and he didn’t know how to explain it to his own brain. Or Ludwig. How was he going to explain it to Ludwig.

Ludwig gasped for breath and it made Ivan want to kiss him even more. He moved in, trying to capture those lips again so they wouldn’t have to talk and call Ivan any specific kind of man, but Ludwig pushed against him now in a way that was no longer seeking his touch.  
“My brother sits outside. I doubt he’ll stay down there all day.”

Oh yeah right. That was a thing. Ivan had forgotten.

With reluctance and anxiety eating him alive he went to sit down on Ludwig’s chair at the desk and willed his blood to stop rushing in his ears, to not singe him from within and crave for a touch that wouldn’t come. Not yet. Maybe. Or ever, Ivan shouldn’t really let this happen but somehow suddenly everything in him yearned for it. For more than that. For hundreds of evenings in the bar together, touching or not, just together. For seeing each other in sunshine and without suits. Sappy thoughts. Ludwig and his poetry, they’d done this to him. Gross.   
Ivan fought tooth and nail to hide a grin.

Ludwig paced, bright red in the face, and fixed his shirt from where Ivan had pried open a button with clumsy hands.   
He smiled, ever so slightly.

Ivan had chosen a path this time. That was uncomfortable and scary because he hadn’t known uncertainty or the unknown before. He had always just been somebody moving from place to place like a piece in a board game, and now he was here on his own volition and he’d made Ludwig smile.

“We’ll go to the bar later, right?” Ivan asked. “You owe me a drink.”

Ludwig kicked him out after that, and met him later at the bar, and made Ivan pay for their drinks.


End file.
